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Repository for holding the OpenWrt Wiki issues tracker
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Write Newcomers guide #17

Open wwahammy opened 9 years ago

wwahammy commented 9 years ago

The current newcomer's guide is extremely sparse http://wiki.openwrt.org/doc/playground/newcomer. We need to flesh out this guide. The goal is a simple but functional OpenWrt installation that "just works", with a minimum of fuss. The criteria for success include:

wwahammy commented 9 years ago

I'll take a crack at this later today.

richb-hanover commented 9 years ago

That would be great. As for any words I've written, please feel free to keep or jettison any that you want.

wwahammy commented 9 years ago

I tried to write a tutorial for flashing my home router. After five hours of setting and resetting, it just randomly started working. I'm not sure quite what happened. That's a whole lot of explanation for "I didn't get as far as I'd like" :)

wwahammy commented 9 years ago

@richb-hanover two questions on your thinking:

wwahammy commented 9 years ago

I've written up the beginnings of a walkthrough at http://wiki.openwrt.org/doc/playground/newcomer and written most of the first step at http://wiki.openwrt.org/doc/playground/walkthrough_overview. My goal is for there to be links from each page to the next step in the walkthrough so it's always clear what to do next.

Don't hesitate to edit and rewrite what's written, I'm not locked into it at all.

richb-hanover commented 9 years ago
  • are we considering the default firewall settings in an OpenWrt image "secure"?

Gosh. I hope so. If not, we need to lobby for that.

  • for setting up the wan, what were you thinking of covering?

I suspect the most common case is Ethernet, using a DHCP address received from the cable or DSL modem. I don't remember the default for OpenWrt, but the guide can tell people how to handle the default.

  • walkthrough & guide

Great. I'll read and respond.

wwahammy commented 9 years ago

@richb-hanover: Ethernet using DHCP is the default I believe so we're good there!

wwahammy commented 9 years ago

As an aside, we should have a method of printing the entire walkthrough for folks who are reading the computer connected to the router they're flashing.

wwahammy commented 9 years ago

I've done a quick draft of the newcomer's walkthrough. There are some parts wherer I'm unsure how to finish it but I think it's worth a review. It's viewable from: http://wiki.openwrt.org/doc/playground/newcomer

Thoughts and suggestions are appreciated!

wwahammy commented 9 years ago

@richb-hanover any thoughts on the newcomer guide?

srdjanrosic commented 9 years ago

The installation instructions should point at some documention (not sure it exists) for people coming from dd-wrt / tomato or some other openwrt fork (gargoyle .. etc).

richb-hanover commented 9 years ago

That's a good thought. Do you have any experience with this? (I'm not aware that of any team members that have experience with those other distributions.)

srdjanrosic commented 9 years ago

I have some prior experience with dd-wrt and a little experience going back and forth between dd-wrt and openwrt on one particular very well supported device.

Some of these other, non openwrt, firmwares rely on nvram for their config storage and sometimes they modify the flash layout and/or the bootloader, which can make the whole openwrt experience somewhat weird.

I've added option 1c to the install wiki for now, just so people know it's something that's not impossible and as people start looking for help, we can gather these examples.

richb-hanover commented 8 years ago

@ericschultz A long time ago, you asked if I had any thoughts on the newcomer's guide in the OpenWrt wiki. I apologize that I only skimmed it at the time, and then it slipped through the cracks.

Having read it over carefully, I think it's quite good. In fact, I made it the primary focus of the Newcomer's Guide, since it's a small number of well-described steps.

The only thing missing is a description of how to set up the WAN link: I think the most important configuration is DHCP - since the vast majority of new people will be connecting to their existing DSL/Cable mode.

Would you have time to complete the description? Thanks.

wwahammy commented 8 years ago

@richb-hanover Sure, I can look into that today or tomorrow

wwahammy commented 8 years ago

@richb-hanover I added a section about connecting to the internet via DHCP at (https://wiki.openwrt.org/doc/playground/walkthrough_wifi). I'm not sure it's a perfect place to add this but it's not a bad spot. Thoughts?